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I think Gnaccolini and I are talking about the upper portrait on the SB 2 of Coins as being Ercole, done in classical Roman style, as befitting a descendant of the ancient Roman family of Attii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Este) and glorious participant in the revival of classical antiquity in his own day. You might try redoing your collage with that part of the 2 of Coins--but remembering that Dante is irrelevant, except for the occasional precedent of the laurel leaves on a modern head.

I totally agree that the lower portrait is based--as a kind of caricature--on a classical Roman model, in fact one similar to one of the coins that Gnaccolini reproduced, as I have already said. The Roman face is then given a modern hat, just as the modern face got the Roman headpiece.

This small drawing is a fragment cut out of an original manuscript written by the Nuremberg humanist (classical scholar), Willibald Pirckheimer (1470-1530) around 1512. The author was also a collector and close friend of Dürer's. The manuscript was a Latin translation from a Greek text, the Hieroglyphica by Horapollo (fourth century AD). Parts of the text can be read on the verso (back) of the drawing. This text was important in the Renaissance as it claimed to explain the hidden meaning of the sacred symbols of ancient Egypt. It stimulated the creation of emblems in which meaning could be hidden except from those who understood them.

This fragment with Dürer's sketches was the first illustration in the manuscript. The sun, the moon and basilisk (half-eagle and half-serpent, hatched from a cock's egg by a serpent). Together these three symbols represented Eternity.

Dürer's illustrations and interest in this strange manuscript is part of his general understanding of the theory and practice of the art and literature of the classical world. This intellectual achievement marks him as one of the leaders of Renaissance studies in the early sixteenth century.

It jumps to my mind ...
Inside my (disputed) Chess-Tarot theory about the Charles VI (given to 1463 in my mental operation) it looks, as if Sun + Moon got as a third element the Fool, which in the Charles VI context should associate Morgante, the giant friend of Orlando, the topic which the poet Luigi Pulci was working on.
The Charles VI has no card for the Magician, and in the Rosenwald Tarocchi it looks, as if in Florence Magician+Fool were merged together to be one figure (Fool with Magician table).

In the following Trionfi tradition we get established the triad Sun-Moon-Star, which seems to have replaced the Caritas-Fides-Spes, which in the Cary-Yale Tarocchi (also suspected to be a sort of Chess Tarot with 16 trumps)
still was present.

Sun-Moon-Star might have been inspired by the 3 holy kings, which in the Medici chapel 1464 were manifested in impressive manner. Florence, as recently researched, had been rather infected with the 3-holy-kings cult.

Now we meet another triad: Sun-Moon-Basilisk, about 50 years later, in the painting of Duerer, but referring to the Horapollo text, who was already present much earlier. The triad shall mean "Eternity", a term, which was used as Petrarca's highest allegory of 6 in the poem Trionfi, which possibly triggered the later production of Trionfi cards.

In the Duerer context another strange animal (first I thought it to be a Basilisk variation) is used to announce the Maximilian Trionfi ... as already shown:

Lorenzo Spirito uses a 20x20x20x20 system (20 Kings, 20 in one group of symbols, 20 in another group of symbols, 20 prophets) and this is similar to the Minchiate, which also could be parted in 4 groups of 20 + 16 courts +1 Fool.
It also has (somehow) 40 trumps:

The first six ...

1. SUN ... each of the other members of this group of 20 trumps have a similar scheme around them

2. Moon

3. Star

4. Scorpio

5. The GRIFFIN

6. Core, the heart

...

The full order seems to have pairing structure (1-2, 3-4, 5-6 etc ...). The Griffin would be paired to Core (heart'). I once puzzled:

*************
Added:
I looked a little bit around and found the Griffin a few times in context of emperor Maximilian. So I would think, that it just is personal heraldic, impresa. As here ...

source: British Museum
Comment:

Copy of a woodcut of c.1500, showing the coat of arms of Maximilian I as King of the Romans, with five shields surrounded by the collar of the Golden Fleece, the top shield with a black single-headed eagle with a nimbus, above one line with letterpress; on the verso a copy of the arms of Florian Waldauf von Waldenstein, with the shield surmounted by two helmets and crests, surrounded by the collar of the Order of the Swan, with one line of letterpress on the top. c.1517

Another form of "Sun-Moon in a triade" should be "Helios, Selene + Eos", all three children of the Titans Hyperion and Theia. Well, old Greek mythology. Helios for the day, Selene for the night and Eos for the periods between night and day (morning and evening).

mikeh wrote:I think Gnaccolini and I are talking about the upper portrait on the SB 2 of Coins as being Ercole, done in classical Roman style, as befitting a descendant of the ancient Roman family of Attii (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Este) and glorious participant in the revival of classical antiquity in his own day. You might try redoing your collage with that part of the 2 of Coins--but remembering that Dante is irrelevant, except for the occasional precedent of the laurel leaves on a modern head.

So one of the wealthiest families in Venice painted their coat of arms onto the deck of cards whose second card featured a portrait of Ercole d’Este, even though their city fought a war with him just a half dozen years before in 1484? THE SB-FERRARA THEORY IS PRIMA FACIE LUDICROUS. And you have not answered the question as to why an Imperial duke would support a deck that featured Roman Republicans with the sole imperial representative being the evil Nero? Particularly since Ferrara’s most famous humanist lead the pro-Caesar argument in the Scipio-Ceasar debate….and [SC]Ipeo appears in the SB but not Caesar! Venice would have had obvious reasons for producing a Roman Republican deck, especially as she had just fended off the Imperial Archduke of Austria from her northern Italian possessions the year before the SB was produced.

Ercole was alive at the time the SB was produced with numerous medals and coins of him available – so it boggles the mind as to how far off the SB porttait is if supposedly of him (the chin especially):

SB Ercole nonsense.jpg (12.4 KiB) Viewed 4163 times

The SB image was obviously taken from a Roman coin – like this denarius of Nerva for instance (who adopted the “good emperor” Trajan as his successor):

The only reason the lower portrait does not immediately register as Dante is because of the slight smile (again, an odd innovation that must be in the context of the preceding melancholia theme on the Ace) and that his hat is not red. But why is it black? Because the Dante figure is also a symbol-of-the-humanist-self for the contemporary Renaissance man grappling with the same Plato-Macrobian cosmos Dante came to terms with in a Chrisitian context in his Comedia and littered with many of the same historical exempli we find in the SB. And the Patrician humanist in Venice who was to identify with the Dantean precedent would have worn a black hat because that was the prerogative of Venetian Patricians – the bareta negra, such as the one worn by B. Bembo in his portrait or the Bellini group painting below (in contast to the red one worn in Florence, for instance).

So one of the wealthiest families in Venice painted their coat of arms onto the deck of cards whose second card featured a portrait of Ercole d’Este, even though their city fought a war with him just a half dozen years before in 1484? THE SB-FERRARA THEORY IS PRIMA FACIE LUDICROUS. And you have not answered the question as to why an Imperial duke would support a deck that featured Roman Republicans with the sole imperial representative being the evil Nero?

Personally, I not and never have been, to the best of my memory, an espouser of the SB-Ferrara theory. To me Venice is the most logical, as far as the commissioner of the deck. There are good reasons for having Ercole in a Venetian-sponsored deck. Sanudo's father had a good relationship with Ercole and Michele. I wrote, in my initial summary of Gnaccolini's article (viewtopic.php?f=11&t=988&p=14771&hilit=Ercole#p14771):

Sanudo is documented as commissioning work by Marco Zoppo, whose style is similar to that of the cards, and had hermetic interests as well as in fostering the printing trade. (Another possibility she mentions is Marco Sanudo, his cousin.) Also, the identification of the two persons on the 2 of Coins as Ercole d'Este and Michele Savonarola fits that family. His father represented Venice in Ferrara at the right time, 1457-59, to have known this physician and pioneer in the use of metallic salts to treat illness (and so an "alchemist" broadly defined).

And at this time, 1491, there was peace between the two cities. It would have been a good time to remember old and better times affectionately. That's part of diplomacy, if nothing else.

Phaeded wrote,

Ercole was alive at the time the SB was produced with numerous medals and coins of him available – so it boggles the mind as to how far off the SB porttait is if supposedly of him (the chin especially):

SB Ercole nonsense.jpg (12.4 KiB) Viewed 10 times.

Well, even on this portrait of Ercole, there is a slight protrusion on the chin. It has simply been exaggerated, like they saw on the coins. Is there no humor in this deck? (At least they straightened his nose.)

I found a few portraits of the younger Alfonso without his beard, in G. F. Hill, Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, Vol. 2, Plates, 1930. At the top are Ercole and Eleanor, from the 1473 wedding, and between them Ercole plus the Hydra. Hill says that the Hydra on the reverse of the small Ercole is similar to a festoon that was printed in 1493.

The bottom 3 are all Alfonso (1476-1534). The child, which includes Alfonso as Hercules, is dated 1478. The small one in the middle is c. 1500, Hill says, i.e. when he was around 24. He would have been around 13 at the time of his first marriage, the same year as the SB. His face might have been leaner then, but I have a feeling it was always rather round.

He looks older than 24 in the picture (or 1 in the other). But the nose fits. Perhaps it is a composite. Or one several could identify with. Sanudo later took an interest in Alfonso's doings, as I recall. His diary is the source of the story that he wandered around Ferrara naked. I quote Andrea Bayer, in Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, ed. Humfrey and Lucco, p. 27:

In 1494 he and painter Ercole de'Roberti angered Alfonso's father by some unacceptable nighttime behavior, while in 1497 rumors of his wandering nude through the city streets traveled as far as Venice. On that occasion Marin Sanudo noted that the Ferrarese found him "poco savio," hardly wise.

This was the year his wife died in childbirth, of course, after she had spent years refusing to consummate the marriage (probably afraid of catching his syphilis). She apparently dressed like a man and hung out with women, except when she was with her "small black slave" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Sforza).

I ran across something of interest about Sanudo, in Farmer's Syncretism in the West. Farmer is discussing the role of Pico's secretary Cristoforo da Casalmaggiore in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's death, namely, his reported confession under torture that he, Cristoforo, had poisoned Pico. Sanudo's Diarii is the source of that confession, from his secretary in Bologna. Sanudo also suggests that Cristoforo was part of the conspiracy to wrest power from Savonarola in 1497. Of interest is Sanudo's ties with the Picos and Poliziano. Farmer says that Sanudo "had close contacts with Gianfrancesco and the piagnoni" (p. 177)and adds:

Farmer then cites Cotton as arguing that "this hand belonged to none other than Gianfrancesco Pico, who, assisted again by Giovanni Mainardi, was that time busily preparing Poliziano's collected works for the press".

Poliziano of course was the leading expert on Roman history, which is the subject of the SB trumps. It seems likely to me that Sanudo's contact with Poliziano went back at least as far as Giovanni Pico's and his visit to Venice. If Poliziano lectured there on Osiris in the early 1480s, it might have been then; Sanudo was 3 years younger than Pico. Poliziano would have reason to cultivate contacts in Venice, as a center for manuscripts (e.g. Bessarion's library) and publishing. Poliziano and Pico both died in 1494, most likely, according to the recent exhumation of their bodies, from arsenic. Poliziano was also homosexual, as convincingly argued in Wikipedia's article on him; that is also something not inconsistent with the SB designs.

mikeh wrote:Poliziano and Pico both died in 1494, most likely, according to the recent exhumation of their bodies, from arsenic. Poliziano was also homosexual, as convincingly argued in Wikipedia's article on him; that is also something not inconsistent with the SB designs.

He was said to have died from a fever, possibly related to Syphilis, Also been suggest that he and Pico were lovers. Arsenic, along with mercury and vitriol, were used to treat syphilis. So possibly they died from their medicine.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. T. S. Eliot

mikeh wrote:Poliziano and Pico both died in 1494, most likely, according to the recent exhumation of their bodies, from arsenic. Poliziano was also homosexual, as convincingly argued in Wikipedia's article on him; that is also something not inconsistent with the SB designs.

He was said to have died from a fever, possibly related to Syphilis, Also been suggest that he and Pico were lovers. Arsenic, along with mercury and vitriol, were used to treat syphilis. So possibly they died from their medicine.

Paola Venier – whose cheerful spirit lifts and whose insignia is impartial justice
Lucretia Venier – is wise and guided by her star along the path of virtue
Isabeta Venier – who is so ardent and willing in love she almost keeps up with her partner, and saves others [Emperor]
Hieronima Venier – has eternal honor and title of empress

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. T. S. Eliot